enough with him." And Drylyn lifted his hand towards the messenger.

They followed his gesture, staring up at the wrong man, then down at the
right one. The chatty neighbor shook his head. "Seems curious," he
said, slowly. "It ought to be done. But I couldn't no more do it--gosh!
how _can_ a man fire his gun right after it's been discharged?"

The heavy Drylyn looked at his comrades of the Gap. "You won't?" he
said.

"You better quit us," suggested the neighbor. "Go somewheres else."

Drylyn's eyes ran painfully over ditch and diggings, the near cabins and
the distant hills, then returned to the messenger. "Him and me," he
muttered. "It ain't square. Him and me--" Suddenly he broke out, "I
don't choose him to think I was that kind of man!"

Before they could catch him he fell, and the wet knife slid from his
fingers. "Sheriff," he began, but his tone changed. "I'm overtakin'
him!" he said. "He's going to know now. Lay me alongside--"

And so they did.

THE SECOND MISSOURI COMPROMISE

I

The Legislature had sat up all night, much absorbed, having taken off
its coat because of the stove. This was the fortieth and final day of
its first session under an order of things not new only, but novel. It
sat with the retrospect of forty days' duty done, and the prospect of
forty days' consequent pay to come. Sleepy it was not, but wide and
wider awake over a progressing crisis. Hungry it had been until after a
breakfast fetched to it from the Overland at seven, three hours ago. It
had taken no intermission to wash its face, nor was there just now any
apparatus for this, as the tin pitcher commonly used stood not in the
basin in the corner, but on the floor by the Governor's chair; so the
eyes of the Legislature, though earnest, were dilapidated. Last night
the pressure of public business had seemed over, and no turning back the
hands of the clock likely to be necessary. Besides Governor Ballard, Mr.
Hewley, Secretary and Treasurer, was sitting up too, small, iron-gray,
in feature and bearing every inch the capable, dignified official, but
his necktie had slipped off during the night. The bearded Councillors
had the best of it, seeming after their vigil less stale in the face
than the member from Silver City, for instance, whose day-old black
growth blurred his dingy chin, or the member from Big Camas, whose
scantier red crop bristled on his cheeks in sparse wandering
arrangements, like spikes on the barrel of a m